PLAN(1L)

NAME
plan - interactive X/Motif calendar and day planner
pland - daemon for plan
notifier - X/Motif text displayer for
netplan - IP server for appointment lists

SYNOPSIS
plan [-h] [-d] [-v] [-o] [-t|T [D [n]]] [-s] [-f] [-k]
plan [mmdd]hhmm [message]*
pland [-d] [-kK]
notifier [-hdv123] [-ttitle] [-ssubtitle] [-iicontitle] [file]
netplan [-dv]

DESCRIPTION
plan is a schedule planner based on X/Motif. It displays a month calendar similar to xcal, but every day box is large enough to show appointments in small print. By pressing on a day box, the appointments for that day can be listed and edited. This manual page describes the command line options of plan. For information on how to use plan, refer to the on-line help pages.

plan has two modes: it starts up with a window in interactive mode if started without date/time string; with date/time on the command line it adds an appointment to the list. Only one interactive plan per user can run at any time.

pland is a daemon that watches for appointment triggers. The daemon is normally started from your .sgisession or .xsession file. It puts itself in the background. If plan is started, it checks for the existence of the daemon, and offers to start one if it can't find it.

notifier displays the standard input in a window, with appropriate titles and background colors. The only program that ever uses it is the daemon; it is a separate program only to keep the daemon small.

netplan is an IP server that is started on one or more designated hosts. It is recommended to use a single host only. netplan uses a directory to store appointment databases. plan and pland programs on various hosts can connect to netplan to read and write shared appointment databases. Use the File->File list option in plan to enable server mode. netplan must be started manually before any plan or pland can connect.

  OPTIONS OF PLAN

-h  List available options.

-d  Print fallback X resources and exit. The output can be appended directly to the ~/.Xdefaults file for modification of the geometry, color, and font defaults.

-v  Print the program version and patchlevel and exit.

-o  If used with -t or -T, also prints appointments of all users configured with the Config->Users popup.

-t [D [n]]
    Print a list of today's appointments to stdout. Don't start up interactive windows. The exit status is 0 if there are appointments on the specified date, and 1 otherwise. If a date D is specified, print appointments on that date. All standard date specifiers work:

    -t +3
        Print appointments in three days

    -t -1
        Print yesterday's appointments

    -t tomorrow
        Print appointments for tomorrow

    -t thursday
        Print appointments for Thursday

    -t 25.12.
        Print appointments for Christmas, if 24-hour mode is selected

    -t 12/25
        Print appointments for Christmas, if 12-hour mode is selected. 12/24 hour mode is selected with the Config pulldown in the main window.

    If a second argument n is given, n days are printed beginning with day D. The default is 1. For example, "plan -t today 7" prints one week.

-T [D [n]]
    Same as -t, but print the end time instead of the length (hi Vera).

-s  Standalone, don't offer to start daemon if none exists. Without daemon, no appointment alarms and warnings will trigger. If a daemon happens to exist, it is notified when the database changes, but no warning is printed if it doesn't.

-f  Don't fork on startup. This is useful for debugging.

-k  If there appears to be another plan running, start up anyway. This is useful if a /tmp/.plan<uid> file got accidentally left behind, and plan fails to check whether the older plan still exists. This option is largely obsolete in version 1.2.

[mmdd]hhmm [message]*
    Add an appointment at mm/dd hh:mm (month/day hours:minutes). If mmdd is not specified, today's date is used. The message, which should be quoted if it contains shell metacharacters, is used as note string. No menus will start up. No option may be specified.

  OPTIONS OF PLAND

-d  Debug mode. Runs pland in the foreground without forking, and prints debugging information. Recommended if pland seems to die unexpectedly. (The most common cause of disappearing pland's is a nonfunctional utmp; if -d is used pland recommends to recompile with the -DRABBITS option.) This option must precede the other options.

-k  If another daemon exists, kill it and restart.

-K  (captal K) If another daemon exists, kill it and exit.

  OPTIONS OF NOTIFIER

-h  List available options.

-d  Print fallback X resources and exit. The output can be appended directly to the ~/.Xdefaults file for modification of the geometry, color, and font defaults.

-v  Print the program version and patchlevel and exit.

-1  Set the window background color to green (early warning).

-2  Set the window background color to yellow (late warning).

-3  Set the window background color to red (alarm). This is the default.

-ttitle
    Set the title string above the message text (which is read from stdin).

-ssubtitle
    Set the subtitle string below the main title, in a small font.

-iicontitle
    Set the icon title string that is printed below the mwm/4Dwm icon.

In addition to these options, plan and notifier support the usual X options -iconic and -geometry.

  OPTIONS OF NETPLAN

-d  Debug mode. Start in the foreground and print debugging information to stderr.

-v  If -d is also specified, print more verbose debugging information.

FILES

Below, DIR and LIB refer to the installation directories specified at the beginning of the Makefile when the programs were compiled. By defauly, they are /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib, respectively. These are the directories where plan and pland first search for executables and plan.help (LIB first, then DIR). Next, $PLAN_PATH and $PATH are searched, and finally, a built-in search path that also contains "." as its last item.

~/.dayplan
    Database with all public entries and configuration options of plan. See plan(4) for details.

~/.dayplan.priv
    Database with all private entries.

~/.holiday
    Definition of holidays. See the help text for the "Define Holiday" popup menu that can be installed with the Holiday pulldown.

/tmp/.planUID
    Lockfile that contains the PID of plan. Used to prevent multiple plan instances, and to send HUP signals to if a non-interactive plan invocation changed the database. UID is the user's numerical user ID.

/tmp/.plandUID
    Lockfile that contains the PID of the pland daemon. Used to prevent multiple daemons, and to send HUP signals to if the database changed for any reason. UID is the user's numerical user ID.

DIR/plan
    The plan program.

LIB/pland
    The pland daemon. It must be in the DIR or LIB directory, or in one of the directories in one of the search paths.

LIB/notifier
    The notifier program. It must be in the DIR or LIB directory, or in one of the directories in one of the search paths.

LIB/netplan
    The netplan IP server. It must be in the DIR or LIB directory, or in one of the directories in one of the search paths. It cannot be started by the root user.

LIB/netplan.dir
    The directory where netplan stores all its databases. It must be writable by any user who might start netplan.

LIB/plan.help
    The online help texts used by plan. It must be in the DIR or LIB directory, or in one of the directories in one of the search paths.

LIB/holiday
    Definition of system standard holidays. They are read before ~/.holiday, and can be overridden in ~/.holiday. They must be edited manually with a text editor.

Note that previous versions put all executables into the DIR directory. Beginning with 1.4.7, all executables except plan are in LIB. To avoid finding obsolete executables first, LIB is searched befor DIR.

Also note that netplan supports primitive access control that requires editing a access list text file on the server host. No support for access control is provided by the plan front-end in this version. Refer to netplan(1) for details.

  AUTHOR
Thomas Driemeyer <thomas@bitrot.in-berlin.de>

Please send all complaints, comments, bug fixes, and porting experiences to me. Always include your plan version as reported by "plan -v" in your mail. To be added to the mailing list, send mail to plan-request@bitrot.in-berlin.de.

See http://www.in-berlin.de/User/bitrot for new releases.